This book argues that a different set of politics is needed—and that there is a rich legacy of struggle from which we can learn.
Chapter one
Slavery in the United States
Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.
—Karl Marx1
The labor of Blacks, forced to come to the New World as slaves, was essential to the economic development not only of the new colonies, whether in the Caribbean, Latin America, or North America, but also the major powers of the “Old World.” But slavery did not come innocent of ideological trappings. A historically distinct ideology designed to justify and maintain the oppression of the slaves developed with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.
Racism and racial oppression have been features of everyday life for Blacks in the United States for more than 350 years. But the persistence of racism is not inevitable and racism, certainly in its modern form, has not always existed. Far from being the unavoidable result of interaction between different peoples, racism and racial oppression emerged in Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism. Ancient and feudal societies before capitalism were able to do without this form of oppression.
Specifically, racism emerged in Western Europe and the New World as a consequence of the slave trade, as the ideological justification for slavery. Prejudice against strangers (xenophobia) and distinctions between “barbarian” and “civilized” existed, but did not take the form of modern racism. So for example,
North American Indians whom European settlers first encountered had a conception of “outsider,” i.e., non-members of the band, tribe, or nation. But the fact that it carried no racial connotation is shown not only by the practice of adoption of Indian captives of other nations into the tribe to replace lost loved ones, but also of the adoption of captured white Europeans as full-fledged members of the tribe. “Thousands of Europeans are Indians,” complained Hector de Crévecoeur in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, but “we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”2
As historian Frank Snowden has argued:
Color prejudice has been a major issue in the modern world.... Notable, therefore, is the fact that the ancient world did not make color the focus of irrational sentiments or the basis for uncritical evaluation. The ancients did accept the institution of slavery as a fact of life; they made ethnocentric judgments of other societies; they had narcissistic canons of physical beauty; the Egyptians distinguished between themselves, “the people,” and outsiders; and the Greeks called foreign cultures barbarian. Yet nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world. This is the view of most scholars who have examined the evidence and have come to conclusions such as these: the ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin color was not a sign of inferiority; Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration in society; and ancient society was one that “for all its faults and failures never made color the basis for judging a man.”3
The slave system that developed in the New World was different in fundamental respects. Chief among these was the fact that it was “racially” based—Africans were the slaves—even if the reasons for the enslavement of Blacks were economic and not racial. The initial attempts to meet the enormous—and ever-increasing—demand for labor in the New World included attempts to enslave Native peoples and whites. When these attempts failed, Africans became the chief source of labor.
“It has been said of the Spanish conquistadors,” writes Eric Williams, one of the pioneering historians of New World slavery in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, “that first they fell on their knees, and then they fell on the aborigines.”4 So after claiming their colonies for God and the King, the Spaniards set about pressing into service the local indigenous population to pump out the colonies’ wealth for the benefit of the Spanish crown.
The Indians were assigned in lots of fifty, a hundred, or more, by written deed or patent, to individual Spaniards to work on their farms and ranches or in the placer mines for gold dust. Sometimes they were given to officials or to parish priests in lieu of part of their annual salary. The effect was simply to parcel out the natives among the settlers to do with as they pleased.5
The results were devastating:
The results are to be seen in the best estimates that have been prepared of the trend of population in Hispaniola. These place the population in 1492 at between 200,000 and 300,000. By 1508 the number was reduced to 60,000; in 1510, it was 46,000; in 1512, 20,000; in 1514, 14,000. In 1548 Oviedo doubted whether five hundred Indians of pure stock remained. In 1570 only two villages survived of those about whom Columbus had assured his Sovereigns, less than eighty years before, that “there is no better nor gentler people in the world.”6
African slave labor proved more plentiful and cheaper than either Native Americans or white indentured servants and eventually slavery was confined exclusively to Blacks. According to Williams,
Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior.... The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his “subhuman” characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.7
Unfree Labor in the North American Colonies
The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose colonies served to export precious metals back to the colonial center, settlers in the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia were planters.8 The settlers’ chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar, and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia, to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants after the settlers failed to build a sustained workforce from